The extent of the crimes against humanity committed by the entity known as the Soviet Union will never be known. Designated enemies were not only persecuted, imprisoned and murdered, but expunged from the record of existence altogether. With the resealing of archives opened in the 1990s, a window for research and reckoning has closed.
An element in the larger history of Soviet state terror concerns the treatment of artists in the distinctive phases of the regime. This study, by the Dutch journalist Michel Krielaars, offers an account for a broad readership of the careers of figures from the world of music, whether internationally revered (Sergei Prokofiev), plunged into periodic obscurity (Klavdiya Shulzhenko, “the Russian Vera Lynn”), or tasked with enforcing cultural policy (Tikhon Khrennikov, general secretary of the Composers’ Union from 1948 to 1991).
Krielaars focuses on the shift that began in the 1930s, when an alignment between revolutionary politics and modernist experiment was replaced by the promotion of melodic and patriotic simplicity. A postwar renewal of official aesthetics included a decree against “formalism”. Such a ban had less to do with actual musical features than with subjecting even the most renowned composers to a condition of generalised intimidation.
Krielaars describes how Dmitri Shostakovich, on hearing of the assassination of the director of the Moscow State Jewish Theatre, Solomon Mikhoels, expressed “envy” for this colleague, because “at least now he has nothing more to fear”. Released from prison after Stalin’s death, the pianist Moisei Weinberg was initially too terrified to leave his cell.
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The chapters evoke a number of themes in the experience of Soviet repression: familial betrayal and opportunistic public criticism; anti-Semitic and homophobic persecution; the distortion of cultural life through censorship and silencing. Krielaars commands all the stratagems of a middlebrow guide, mixing anecdote and testimony with dramatic summary. Lightness sometimes slips into the shorthand of cliche, anodyne or obnoxious: rural aristocratic estates are “straight out of” Chekhov or Turgenev; Beria, Stalin’s psychopathic chief of police, was “a literal lady-killer”.
Nevertheless, The Sound of Utopia infuses a bleak subject with verve, inspiring admiration for musicians so dedicated to their art that they persevered inside the grind of what the writer and chronicler of atrocity Vasily Grossman called a “vast system of mechanized enthusiasm”.
